Trajectory
by NorthOfNever
Summary: Someone else took Clark before the Kents could claim him after the meteor shower, and his guardians have nothing of their integrity. What will returning to Smallville mean, when they all meet again - for the first time? AU
1. Prologue: Trajectory Altered

PROLOGUE: TRAJECTORY ALTERED

Jonathan Kent silently observed his wife, Martha, as she leaned against the open window of the passenger-side door, gazing wistfully but blankly at the clouds and vast Kansas landscape as their truck rumbled along the open country road, carrying them home.

He knew that home was not complete for her.

_I see a little face_, she'd said. _It's all I've ever wanted_.

Martha's thumb idly traced the velvety red petal of one of the tulips they'd purchased from Nell Potter in town. _A very... uncomplicated flower_, Nell had labeled them - and by proxy the woman she saw as the undeserving Mrs. Kent - to which Martha gave nothing but a face-saving half smile and dropped her eyes instead to the fairy princess beside the counter. One of many little faces that served to remind her that she'd never have one. She, Martha Kent, was an uncomplicated flower - less than that, even. The tulip beside her was hearty, thick-stemmed and strong, sprung perennially from a bulb that had one purpose and fulfilled it. A simple, ugly little root could do year after year what she couldn't do even once. Uncomplicated, but complete was that bulb and its offspring, which she'd brought home to adorn her dinner table.

A table set for only two.

Martha gave her husband her gentle, introspective smile - the one he knew was her thin attempt to tell him that she was unaffected, but signaled that she'd appreciate his arm supporting her when they returned to trek up the front steps of their empty house. It pained her to know that she gave him cause to feel as if he'd left her dissatisfied. She never intended it, but Jonathan Kent had a long-standing ability - almost a need - to bear responsibilities that hadn't been demanded of him.

_I know what you wished for_.

Of course he knew.

The wish wasn't only hers.

"What's happening, Jonathan?" Martha had cried, her voice sounding disembodied and distant as she called out, the words not even registering clearly in Jonathan's mind until he opened his eyes to find the top of his skull pressed achingly against the upholstered ceiling of the truck. Smallville had seemed to suddenly incur the wrath of the cosmos, leaving the Kents dangling by their safety belts with the largely unafflicted tulips lying scattered around their heads.

Toes. Ankles. Was that really what he saw? Fleshy little legs carried on surprisingly steady feet amid the surrounding debris, stepping closer to his window.

"Martha?" Jonathan said searchingly, as much to assure himself that he was in fact conscious as to get his wife's attention. Surely the trauma had just inflicted him with a manifestation of their shared dreams. He couldn't be seeing a child - not here, now now. A perfect, unmarred child.

Then there it was. _The little face_. It came into view, and one look at Martha's eyes told Jonathan that it was as real as every tear they'd shed in wishing for that very sight.

The boy smiled.

He had found them.

The second pair of feet came with no warning, shod in muddy workboots with the legs above them clad in tattered denim. A third person followed, planting one foot almost inside the window of the truck as the child was suddenly ripped from their view.

There was no way that he could prove it, but Jonathan Kent innately knew that neither of those people had any claim to the boy.

His heart had claimed him already.

"No!" he cried out, struggling against the seatbelt, which held him fast. "Wait!" Martha repeated his plea and she tried to no avail to release herself as well.

"Damn it! They're conscious! Do you think they saw it?" a female voice said, thick with apprehension.

"Shut up! It doesn't matter, just go, we gotta hurry!" a man ordered with pressing authority.

"But what about that thing? What is it? We can't just leave it here!"

"No time, we gotta go - get the kid and start the car. Now!"

The last things Jonathan remembered before crawling out of his truck an hour later and finding himself and his wife looking down at a pod-like vessel, were a wicked sneer and a flash of something green before it struck him in the forehead.


	2. Cry Havoc

CHAPTER ONE: CRY HAVOC

The steel-blue Porsche with Metropolis plates hurtled down the open country road at a pace that could only be bred by a life that moved faster than anything that had been reared in Smallville, with its open and languorous landscape. The vehicle's occupant contemptuously noted its vastness - not for its beauty, peace, or natural grandeur, but for its emptiness. Sparse. A wide expanse, amber waves of grain that in dawn's early light undoubtedly inspired men with less impatience, but no force had yet come in to Lex Luthor's life that could awaken such perspective.

And none would.

The song on the radio irritated him, but so did his new life, so he let the music wash over his discontent as he rounded a curve at break-neck speed. He hated Smallville already, though he'd always felt bound to it. He knew one day that he'd be drawn back, but he resented that it happened by his father's will. He resented anything that happened by his father's will.

Perhaps it was his resentment that induced Lex Luthor to do a most uncharacteristic thing that day.

He wished.

_If wishes were horses, beggars would ride_. Wishes were futile, made only by those without foresight, resources, power and drive to make things happen. To exact change without need of idle dreaming. Lex did not make wishes - not since he'd learned what bitter residue was left by wishes unfulfilled. But there were times when those dreams left unlived - combined with his remaining youth - found Lex in a tiny span of need, in which his most fervent desire was one that he had no means to grasp on his own.

In that moment, as the young, promising future mogul neared the empty bridge, he uttered a silent plea for intervention. Some cosmic event that would displace his current course and send him reeling, if only for a moment, so that his father's notice could not be above him, nor his concern. Nor his love, had Lex dared to wish that fully.

It almost broke his heart to dare.

Wishes, prayers, desires, hopes - none are ever answered in the ways that one expects, so one seldom notices when the manifestation is visited. Lex's life was intervened upon with the simplest, most mundane of distractions, one that he could not have known would be the last he would receive. The ringing phone took his attention, the bale of wire rolled off of that oncoming truck, and in one terrible instant, Lex Luthor learned that wishes do indeed come true.

His course was altered.

The bridge was empty.

The guardrail was weak, and the water below was almost as cold as the realization that flooded him as it rushed through the gaping windshield to give him all that he'd ever uselessly wished for - his mother's face, his brother's smile, his father's love. Things that no power on Earth could give him, but by his prayer he was no longer denied them.

Because there was nothing in Smallville to save him.


	3. Ties That Bind

CHAPTER TWO: TIES THAT BIND

Most days on the Kent farm were full enough. There was work to be done - far more than was meant for two people alone, but the yields from that work afforded them little help. Martha feared for her overworked husband and threw herself into the farm's maintenance alongside him, leaving almost nothing of the space between sunsets to reflect on the absence that neither of them could really understand feeling.

They didn't talk like they used to, exchanging warmth and wit with ease and eagerness, but there was no love lost between them. They'd slipped into a comfortable age, in which they saw no mystery to require much conversation, and little conflict to ignite it. With only the two of them, in relative isolation, life was harmonious by both necessity and design. Though Jonathan sometimes felt he'd kept Martha from being who she could have been - the affluent and successful lawyer that her father had wished and expected her to be - and she in turn feared that she was not enough help to him, they felt content in one another.

Most days.

But there was one day, each October for the past twelve years, on which the one emptiness that haunted them and kept them from feeling truly complete thrust itself into the foreground. On that day, though the business of life went on, each part of it felt a little less purposeful. Jonathan would reflect bitterly on his home, his legacy, how he toiled day after to day to preserve what had been handed down to him, acutely aware he didn't have anyone to pass it along to himself.

Martha ached to fill her arms and heart with the life of someone who would depend on her, who would come to her with triumphs and defeats and need both her counsel and her praise. A little face to nurture, to watch grow, to become what only a child raised by her and Jonathan could be.

They'd considered adoption. Almost every year at this time they discussed it again, really only in the hope that this would be the year that they would find the face they'd been searching for. They contacted agencies, sometimes adding themselves to lists only to ask to be removed later. Though nearly desperate to open their home to a child who needed them, they inexplicably knew that it was meant for only one child. Something indefinable held them back, binding them to a lost boy that was never theirs, a pair of smiling eyes set into a preternaturally serene face that had been snatched from their grasp before he was really in it. Jonathan and Martha Kent longed to share their lives and their quiet rooms with that surely boisterous and ebullient presence, and no amount of trying to replace that image could quell that thought.

They had a sense of destiny.

Inevitably, after applications had been filed and petitions had been signed, one or both would find themselves in the storm cellar, peeling back an oil cloth that covered the secret of the child they'd known for less than an instant. Somehow, though they seldom gave voice to it, they both knew that the boy was meant to be there, with them. No child they saw could replace the image that had already been burned into their memories.

The only hope they had was to believe they'd find him again.

XXXXXXXX

"Jonathan, no!" Martha hoarsely insisted, holding her husband back by the elbow as he pulled his well-loved jacket on over the t-shirt he'd been sleeping in. "You can't go out there by yourself, you don't know who might be out there - or how many there are!" The worry on her face was evident, even in the half-light of the moon filtering through the kitchen curtains.

"I'll be fine, Martha, it's probably just a dog or something caught in that bale of chicken wire," he protested lightly, placing a hand on the doorknob as he made a move to investigate the scuffling sound they'd both heard coming from the barn. "We've found stranger things holed up in there."

"Well, then I'm going with you," Martha asserted.

"No, you wait here, I'll be right back," Jonathan ordered. "I'm sure it's nothing."

Martha nodded, long-familiar with her husband's protective attributes. "You're sure it's safe?" she queried in open concern, her eyes widened with unease.

"Of course I'm sure, nothing to worry about," Jonathan answered with a "scouts' honor" expression and an affirming kiss on her forehead.

"Good," Martha said with a stalwart nod of her head. "Then there's no reason I shouldn't go with you," and she ducked under his arm and through the door before he could object again.

_Jonathan Kent, you really should have seen that coming._ With a sigh that commingled the small defeat with his undiminished admiration for his wife's boldness and wit, he followed her to the barn, the requisite baseball bat clutched firmly in hand.

Martha paused just outside the gaping entrance to the structure, letting Jonathan take the lead as they advanced inside. There were always flashlights in the tool chest, which stood nearby, so he gingerly slid the drawer open, taking one light for himself and one for Martha.

Jonathan cast the beam over the main level, finding everything in dormant order as expected. Even the chicken wire, which he'd been chiding himself for not putting away properly as he brushed his teeth that evening, lay undisturbed and unoffending to any unfortunate wildlife - though he didn't remember having left it rolled so neatly. He toured the room cautiously, peering around corners and under workbenches laden with newly-whitewashed shutters for the house. He'd been meaning to paint them for years, but the work of the farm never eased long enough, and there were barely enough hands to get it done. He'd made time now, as a gift for Martha. He couldn't give her finery, but he could give her crisp white shutters.

"I don't see anything," Jonathan reported, turning a circle in the center of the room and letting the beam of light follow his eyes. He'd almost decided that it might have just been the wind at the loft window again, making the always-closed doors clatter against their hinges, when the blue-white light fell on something just barely visible on the floor of the loft, near the top step. Something almost completely obscured by a dusty horse blanket slung over the rail.

Something that moved.

"Jonathan!" Martha exclaimed when they both heard something scramble, and the foot that Jonathan had seen retreated from view.

Jonathan leapt up the stairs two at a time, arriving at the top to find a dark, frail figure clawing desperately at the locked window. "Give it up, you're caught," Jonathan ordered. "Who are you? What do you think you're doing here?" He advanced on the intruder, expecting retaliation, and was surprised when the slender image retreated into a shadowy corner, stealthily, quietly - fearfully.

Jonathan looked over his shoulder to find Martha had come up as well, and was standing with a hand over her heart as she apprehensively watched her husband step precariously closer to their uninvited guest. "Jonathan," she whispered, though she didn't know why.

"Stay back, Martha," Jonathan directed with an open-handed arm stretched toward her. He moved in on the huddled being in the corner, who plainly had more fear of Jonathan than he himself possessed, especially now that there seemed to be no threat. He let the light wash over the darkly-clad boy - it must be a boy, for the shoulders belied that much - and knelt before him. "Who are you?" Jonathan repeated with much softer intonation. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm sorry," came the boy's muffled words, spoken through his knees where he'd hidden his face, his head covered with a newsboy cap. "I was just - I was going to sleep here, I would have been gone by morning."

Jonathan reached a hand out to the boy's shoulder, but he gasped and shied away, pulling further into the corner and tucking his chin deeper against his chest.

"I'm sorry - so sorry - I wouldn't have been any trouble, you wouldn't have known I was here if I hadn't gotten tangled in the chicken wire - but I got it all rolled up again, I'm sorry!" The boy - about fourteen years of age, if Jonathan were to venture a guess - clearly expected dire repercussions for his actions.

_He got tangled in the chicken wire and rolled it up again in ninety seconds? There's not a scratch on him_. But closer examination did indeed reveal evidence of clothing that had lost a skirmish with the mesh's raw edges. "It's okay, I'm the one who left it out," Jonathan appeased, offering a compassionate smile that gathered in the warm creases around his eyes. "How did you get it rolled up so fast?" He needed to gain something of a rapport with the youth; there was clearly no forcing him out of the loft. They needed trust.

The boy finally looked up, his brow furrowed in confusion. "Why should it have taken longer?"

But the words were lost to Jonathan - it was only the lips they passed through that he noticed, the eyes, the dark locks protruding from the beneath the gray cap. They wore the guise of strife and struggle now, but he remembered them spread with serenity, a smile with promise… that little face.

Jonathan fell back from his knees, colliding with the floor but keeping the light trained on the boy's face. "Mar… Martha…" he beckoned, barely able to summon a whisper, let alone the full force of his voice. _Martha!_ He could only cry out on the inside.

Martha rushed to his side, all of her concerns about how he'd been pushing himself to do the work of ten men converging in one fearful moment. His demeanor was stricken, as if his heart were in the clutches of a crushing vise. _The doctor had warned you about straining yourself_… But then Martha looked at the boy.

The little face.


	4. Parallel

CHAPTER THREE: PARALLEL

_You wouldn't have known I was here if I hadn't gotten tangled in the chicken wire_. Call it an accident of fate, providence, divine intervention, or coincidence. Whatever the label, Jonathan Kent was never so thankful to have left a chore half-done. _You wouldn't have known I was here_. The boy would have come and gone - the unnamed missing piece to the puzzle of their life would have literally passed right through the middle of it, had it not been for one, small, unimportant moment in which the dull but insistent throbbing that pulsed through Jonathan's back won the greater of his attentions, and he left the remainder of his work until the morning.

_You wouldn't have known._

Jonathan shuddered and watched the boy as he meekly followed Martha to the kitchen door, his sweater-clad arms clutched around himself more for protection than for warmth. His eyes, sunken but bright, darted over the pre-dawn landscape of the Kent farm as the sun's first rays were evidenced by a soft glow rising in the distance. He looked delicate, almost like porcelain - though quick and alert - his head in constant motion like a mother bird guarding her nest. He was cloaked by fear and uncertainty - traits which shrouded him like the mist that crept among the trees of the nearby woods in the early morning. Like the fog, he stayed low, his spirit almost visibly hugging the ground as if he half expected that at any moment he'd be torn away from it.

But for all the quiet suffering portrayed on his doll-like visage, he bore remarkable strength. It was undeniable - he was sure-footed, though cautious, and while he looked almost malnourished, he showed no sign of weakness. He moved furtively, but purposefully, and something burned in his eyes behind the pressing weight of whatever life had taken him away.

The life that had evidently pushed him back.

The three traversed from the barn to the house in silent wonder; Martha and Jonathan musing in awe over the return of the boy - almost as sudden and jarring as his first arrival had been, since they had imagined it for so long. But to the young man - the one to whom the Kents should have been strangers - having grown up somewhere beyond what they saw as their meager influence, the wonder was not as encompassing as he'd expected. His journey was quick and deliberate, and though he knew not what he'd find at its end, he'd expected the unexpected. Something unknown, something foreign - something alien to him. But this…

It was familiar.

It was exactly what he'd always had.

A tear slipped over his cheek, remorseful, disappointed. "This is your home?" he asked brokenly.

"And my father's before me, and his before him," Jonathan nodded, though he sensed it brought the boy no comfort. He reached a tentative arm out to the woolen shoulder of the worn sweater, but his fingers were still several inches off their mark when the boy dropped back a step, eyeing the open hand distrustfully. Jonathan withdrew it and offered an apologetic half-nod in its place, pressing his lips into a thin, regretful line.

The boy lifted his face to the house, then turned a slow circle as he surveyed all that he could see in the light of the slowly emerging sun. It didn't make sense; he was so certain he'd seen other things as he traveled, so sure he'd find such things here. _Why was I called here, to a place no different from where I was_? He made no effort to hide the second tear that slipped from his eye. In truth, it had been years since he even noticed them when they fell; they were so recurrent. Though they were usually more bitter. "Is every place like this?" he wondered aloud, his words as distant as his hope.

Martha smiled warmly and gingerly approached the child - he really was no more than that - and spoke to him for the first time. "No, it isn't," she said serenely. "It's like no place else."

The boy shook his head and faced the sun as it climbed the ladder of clouds in the east. "I came from a place like this. I _ran_ from a place like this. It was the only place I ever saw, and I thought… I thought it would be different outside. I thought it would be different here."

Jonathan was awash with guilt, empathy and anger. Part of him had always known that care of this boy had been charged to him, and each year that passed with the child's absence was marked by Jonathan as yet another year of failure. He longed to embrace him, now that he was finally here - where he always should have been - but dared not reach out again.

Martha dared, however. As deep as Jonathan's pain over the missing boy was, her pain was born of something deeper, more visceral, something carnal and instinctive. Life had left her greatest dream denied, then showed it to her for only a moment before cruelly ripping it away again, leaving a rift in the fabric of he heart that she could not mend. She had not the means. Until now.

"What is your name?" She asked him evenly, in careful measure. She stepped closer.

The boy turned to her and assessed her shrewdly, as if he possessed some faultless means of judging her heart. He seemed to find her in earnest. "Callen."

"Callen," she repeated, closing the distance between them and extending both her arms at a painstaking pace, despite their hunger. When he made no move to retreat, she raised a hand to each side of his face - he flinched, but only for an instant, arrested as he was by the tenderness in her eyes. Her hands held his face, and he himself gripped her forearms, concurrently panicked and placated by the gentle touch.

A lonely tear rolled over his cheek to meet her palm - the long-waiting hand of this mother, who had only now met her son.

"Callen," she said again, her voice constricted by the ardor of her soul. "You will _never_ have to run from here."


	5. The Yorkshire School

CHAPTER FOUR: THE YORKSHIRE SCHOOL

Callen's face was alight with wonder, confused though it was. As he followed Martha through the door and into the house, he found himself blinking against the vivid warmth of the scene before him while Martha flicked on the lights. It wasn't his eyes, however, that required adjustment to this new illumination.

_This is… not the same._

A smile began to tug tentatively at the reluctant corner of his mouth, and though he tried to suppress it, it spread until his teeth were revealed in a rapturous grin so wide that it forced a happy tear - the first of its kind - from his eye. He brought a hand to his mouth, as much to convey his awe as to hide the joy it evoked.

"This is your home?" Callen had said those same words only moments before, but they carried the sting of bitter disappointment then. Now they were hopeful, heartened, spoken with admiration. Almost covetous.

"That it is. It's not fancy, but it is home," Jonathan replied. He was startled and deeply moved when Callen flung his arm toward him, making contact with his shoulder and grabbing a handful of Jonathan's coat. He was startled further still by the fervor with which the boy's gaze met his.

"This is a _palace_," Callen whispered in earnest, punctuating the statement with piercing eyes before turning them again on the interior of the house. He released Jonathan's shoulder and stepped deeper into the room, visually drinking in every detail of the space. There were colors and textures and even shapes in this new place that his existence thus far had never exposed him to. Ginghams and florals and rich wood hues, soft light from table lamps, sentimental artifacts that had no use or monetary value. The stuff of fiction, as in Callen's life, only fiction had shown him these things.

And it was fiction that drew his attention next. Set against the wall, he noted a shelf of well-loved classics. _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, The Hobbit, Anne of Green Gables, The Chronicles of Narnia, Pride and Prejudice_… there were at least another dozen titles, most of which he'd read, but two words on the spine of one particularly aged volume took both his breath and his defenses.

"_Nicholas Nickelby_?" Callen tore the book from the shelf and turned it over in his hands as if assuring himself that it wasn't merely an apparition. "You've read _Nicholas Nickelby_?"

Martha nodded and stepped up to him, placing a hand over his on top of the book. "Yes, we've both read it. Is it a favorite of yours?" She searched behind his eyes, fearing she might know the reason he felt such an affinity with the text.

Callen nodded, then shook his head. "No - well, yes it is, but - it's not my favorite exactly, it's more… it's _my_ story."

Martha's resilience crumbled against the sob that had collected in her throat, and Jonathan dropped his face into his hands. It was no mystery now why the boy had shied away from being touched.

"You… you mean Smike?" Martha queried cautiously, referring to the most tragic character of the Charles Dickens novel, who suffered at the hands of a wicked schoolmaster and his wife in the North of England until a young man who'd been sent there to teach - Nicholas Nickelby - altered his fate by standing up to Wackford Squeers, the schoolmaster, thereby securing freedom for them both. But somehow, both Jonathan and Martha sensed that it was not Nicholas with whom Callen identified - a thought which wrenched their hearts collectively. "Were you at a school like that? Like Dotheboys Hall?"

Callen shook his head again. "No. I've never been to school. I lived in a place like this - a farm - but the house wasn't like this at all. And the people weren't like you. They were like Mr. and Mrs. Squeers. On their good days, at least." He tagged on the last line with a snickering sneer, belying a sense of wounded humor.

Without warning, Martha threw her arms around him, embracing him tightly. He instinctively struggled for a moment at first, but allowed himself to relax against her when her grip on him tightened.

"Oh, Callen, I'm so sorry," she cried, and he felt the dampness of her tears seeping through his sweater.

Tears of his own came up again, but this time he noticed, because this time - for the first time - they were for someone else's pain. "Why are you sorry?" He wondered aloud, slowly - very slowly - raising his arms to return her embrace. It felt so foreign to him; he couldn't remember the last time he'd been hugged. In truth, he couldn't remember a first time. Callen pushed Martha away just enough to see her face. "Why should you be sorry?"

Martha couldn't find the words with which to respond. She'd thought of a thousand things over the past twelve years that she could have done differently that day, any small detail that might have meant she'd have been out of the overturned truck with her arms around the little boy before those boots came into view. Everything would have been different then. He wouldn't have been living the darkest side of a Dickens' novel for more than a decade, he would have been there, with them - a Kent - and who knew what else? What might he have been like?

Before anyone could speak again, Callen's eyelids fluttered and his knees buckled, and though he quickly regained his balance, it was clear that the boy was fatigued. Martha, her arms still encircling him, laid a steadying hand on his back.

Jonathan swallowed and tried to nonchalantly wipe away a tear of his own. "Why don't we all try and get some sleep?"

Callen looked confused. "We just need a little sunlight."

Jonathan and Martha glanced at each other, bewildered. "Sunlight?"

Callen nodded. "Of course we have to sleep some time, but for now…" he paused and looked at the faces of his two hosts. They both looked exhausted. "Well, actually, I could definitely use some sleep," he conceded, and yawned for effect. Inwardly, he was shocked at himself for doing so - yawning in front of authority figures. What must they think? How could he have let himself feel so at ease so quickly?

Martha gave Callen a final squeeze before releasing him, albeit reluctantly. "Well then… I'll show you to your room. You'll want to put on fresh sheets though, I haven't changed them in a while. I can do that for you."

Callen followed her toward the stairs and smiled to himself. "Anything you have already is perfect. Don't go to any trouble for me."

Martha turned around on the stairs, a bit faster than she'd intended, and caught both Callen and Jonathan, who brought up the rear, a little off guard. "Oh no - please, I want to. I'd really like to."

Callen merely nodded his assent. "Oh - okay, if you want to." He glanced over his shoulder at Jonathan, who smiled warmly. Facing forward again, Callen continued climbing the stairs and was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling he'd never experienced before - someone going before him to prepare his way, someone following after him without malice - someone very whose presence didn't make him feel ill. He felt… protected.

Arms laden with sheets and pillowcases, Martha allowed Jonathan to open the door and lead the way into a darkened room. It was fairly sparse, but warm all the same. Callen had no way of knowing, but it would have already been his if he'd come home with them a dozen years before.

XXXXXXXXXXXX

Back in their own room, Jonathan lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling, one arm folded behind his head and the other wrapped around his wife, who had tucked herself beneath it in the spot made just for her.

Only an hour had passed.

One hour since they'd heard that scuffling sound in the barn.

One hour since he'd debated going out to investigate it.

One hour since he'd last stared up at the ceiling.

Everything looked different now. The colors in their lives had been - though they were unaware - as restrained as they themselves were, everyone and everything in the Kent house holding its breath as if waiting for something. As if the last twelve years were a pause in their true lives. As if between the meteor shower and finding Callen in the barn, their lives hung in limbo. The colors were muted.

Now everything - even the light - was more brilliant, buzzing and glowing with a new, electric hope - a sense of purpose, dreams and destinies finally coming into focus.

"Jonathan?"

"Hmm?"

"He's staying, isn't he?"

"Why wouldn't he?"

"Why would he? He doesn't remember us, I don't think. And he's a minor, I'm sure that whoever had him has filed some kind of - "

"Whoever took him," Jonathan interrupted. "He was taken. He was supposed to be here all along."

Martha bit her lip and snuggled closer. "You know I believe that, Jonathan - you know I do, but courts don't see things that way."

"He belongs with us, Martha," Jonathan said resolutely. "That's all there is to it. Him being here now proves it - this wasn't by chance. No, he belongs here, and nobody is taking him away from us again. We spent all these years looking, but - we didn't find him, Martha. He found us."


	6. Caught

CHAPTER FIVE: CAUGHT

Callen stared down from the loft window, letting his gaze wash over the landscape which glowed marvelously beneath the late-morning sun. He'd remained in bed, watching the increasing light as it poured through the window beside him until he knew that his hosts were asleep. The rising sun was chasing away the night's darkness, and he couldn't bear to miss a moment of the new brightness that it brought.

And so it was that - though it was really hours beyond the time when work would have begun on the Kent farm on any typical day - Jonathan, having just been awakened by the aroma of fresh coffee, was astonished to find Callen in the barn looking out over the land, the work of which had already been tended to with nothing more to be done until the evening.

"Callen?" Jonathan whispered, a part of his mind still disbelieving that the boy was really there.

Callen jumped, startled by the voice behind him. He wheeled to face Jonathan and simultaneously stepped away from him, frantically searching the loft for some task that he might appear to have been involved in. "I'm sorry, Mr. Kent, I - I wasn't daydreaming, I can do whatever else needs finishing."

Jonathan was incredulous. "You're sorry? I… what could you be sorry for?" He turned a circle and took note of the barn's interior, which had always been neat enough, but was now nearly as clean as Martha kept her kitchen. "Did you… how… Callen, did you do all this? All the chores, and cleaning the barn…?" He continued to crane his neck, looking around in wonder until his eyes fell again to the boy.

Callen looked uncomfortable. "Did I not do it right?"

"Did you not… _what_?" Jonathan stared at Callen, aghast. "The stalls and fences and the… the milking and the feed and… did you - how did you…?"

"How did I what, Mr. Kent?" Callen replied inquisitively, confused as to Jonathan's awe.

"How long did it take you do to all this?"

Callen cast his expression downward and toed a nail that was protruding from a floorboard, pressing it easily back into place with his toe. "Almost two hours. I would have been done sooner if I'd known where everything was, I'll be faster next time, I promise." His tone fell into a mumble as he braced himself against the anticipated punishment. It didn't come.

He raised his head finally to find Jonathan still staring at him, his coffee cup tipped precariously so that its contents were in danger of slipping over the lip. "You did half a day's work for five men in less than two hours?"

"_Half a day's work_!" Callen exclaimed before clapping a regretful hand over his mouth. "Half a day - if I _ever_ took half a day to do that little I wouldn't have eaten for a week!"

Jonathan's confusion was apparent and consuming. "They starved you if you didn't…' He pensively rubbed a shaking hand over his face. "How would that even be possible, for you to… " Yet another sentence trailed into silent disbelief, and with it slipped Jonathan's grip on the steaming mug in his hand. He flinched and tried to recover the cup before it hit the floor, but his outstretched hand found nothing to catch. He blinked at the empty air where the cup should have been, and the dry, bare floor where it should have landed and spilled his coffee across the boards… but there was nothing.

Then he glanced back toward the window, and again the expectation of his eyes was eluded - the boy was not there.

"Here you go, Mr. Kent," Callen's voice offered meekly from just behind him, to his left. Jonathan turned to find him tentatively holding the cup, from which not a drop had spilled.

Jonathan's head swiveled again from left to right, from the window to the boy at his elbow and back again. "How…?" Sentences were becoming more and more impossible to complete.

"I'm sorry," Callen answered apologetically. "You just didn't look like you were going to catch it."

"Of course," Jonathan said distantly. "So you - you caught it. Yeah, makes sense." He was nodding, wide-eyed and jumpy. "Yeah, you - you were ten feet away, and you caught it. Didn't spill it. Just _caught_ it." He stared down at his reflection on the surface of the dark liquid in the cup.

"Mr. Kent?" Callen prompted quietly. "I'm… sorry, Mr. Kent - did I do something wrong?"

Looking up into Callen's lonely eyes, another piece of Jonathan's heart broke for the boy, jutting sharply into the part of his soul that carried a sense of responsibility for his welfare. Clearly there was something extraordinary about him - something that it had been Jonathan's duty to protect - and now he was faced with eyes overrun by a decade's worth of maltreatment. In Callen's eyes, Jonathan saw his own failure.

A tear filled the corner of one eye as Jonathan fought the choking sensation that rose in his throat. "No," he managed almost mutely. "No Callen, you've done nothing wrong." He nodded to himself, to the floor, to his coffee - then reached for Callen's shoulder.

He did not shy away.

Moved beyond words, Jonathan grasped his shoulder and then gave his back a gentle clap. "We… ah. We ought to go talk with Martha now."


	7. The Powers That Be

CHAPTER SIX: THE POWERS THAT BE

Jonathan eyed the boy from head to tow as he walked behind him into the house. Letting the screen door of the kitchen fall into place, he pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and motioned for Callen to take a seat.

"I'll… uh, I'll go and find Martha, and we'll come back and have a talk, okay?" he spoke, rubbing a pensive hand over his mouth and chin.

Callen nodded sullenly and kept his eyes focused downward, studying his fingertips - fingertips that Jonathan himself now glanced at, noting that they looked perfectly groomed, not a hangnail or ragged edge to be seen. Not the hands of a boy who'd spent every day of his life under the weight of a farm's labor.

"What's going on?" Jonathan asked. He meant it generally, though he had no idea what he expected to find out. Something about this boy defied understanding.

Callen took Jonathan's query to have more acute relevance. "Nothing's going on, it's just - would you mind if I didn't wait here? I'm always told to wait somewhere while people go off and talk about me. They think I don't know, but I do. If you and Mrs. Kent have something to discuss about me, I'd like to know what it is." His words were offered meekly but he nonetheless felt as if he'd overstepped his bounds, and as such he drew back slightly and caught his breath on the last word. "I mean, that is, if it's okay with you, I - I don't want to impose, I just… I don't want to be left out. I guess. I'm sorry." He suddenly began to look panicked. Being unaccustomed to having the right to speak for himself, he found that he was taking what he saw as excessive liberties with his new freedom. "Would you… uh - would you like me to clean something? Or fix something? I can - "

"Callen," Jonathan interrupted, holding up a settling hand. "You've done more than enough already - I just thought you might want to sit and take a breather after all of that, but you certainly don't have to. Come on - let's go find Martha."

Martha Kent's eyes shifted from one face to the other and back again, over and over as she digested all that she'd just learned. Jonathan looked amazed and a little unsettled, Callen looked confused and afraid, as if he expected to be asked to leave, and Martha herself could not yet decipher which feeling it was that caused her chest to tighten and her jaw to extend downward. The three stood in the upstairs hall, where the stack of towels that Martha had been holding should still be scattered across the floor, as they'd been when her husband and their guest came upon her so stealthily and startled her into dropping them. Yes, they should be on the floor, but they'd been retrieved and refolded and replaced in her arms almost before she realized they'd fallen.

Jonathan no longer needed to tell her about his coffee cup. He merely observed her as the gears turned, knowing that behind those astonished eyes her brain was racing and asking a million questions that his own mind had jumbled together only moments before. She glanced at him searchingly and he nodded.

"Callen," he began with a parentally authoritative tone that surprised him. "I think it's time we talk about where you come from."

Callen nodded and followed Jonathan's gesture to head back downstairs, where they all gathered at the kitchen table. None spoke for what seemed an interminable length of time, until Callen said the last thing Jonathan or Martha expected.

"I remember you."

Jonathan sputtered and Martha jerked her head up in shock. Callen looked tearfully from face to face, asking himself why it had been so long since he'd last seen those faces.

"I wondered why you never came for me."

Jonathan's heart tore in two and his soul bled profusely through the gash. "Callen," he choked. "I - we… we didn't know, we tried - "

"I know," Callen soothed. "I know. I meant when I was little, I wondered. I didn't understand yet that you had no idea where I was."

Martha, speechless, laid a trembling hand over her racing heart. All those years they'd felt so tied to this boy, to that little face in their memories. How could it never have occurred to her that he might feel the same bond?

"I started to understand when I read _Nicholas Nickelby,_" Callen continued. "How all the boys' parents were lied to, and they all thought their sons were doing well and being treated well, so they never came to save them. But you - you didn't even have lies to read. You didn't know where I was at all."

Jonathan gripped the boy's shoulder. "We would have come for you if we knew, lies or no lies. We tried year after year to find you."

"I know," Callen nodded. "I know that now, I mean."

"So you…" Martha began, struggling to find words. "You felt it too? All these years, you felt that… connection? Is that how you found your way back?"

Callen smiled wanly and shook his head. "No, I uh… I stole this," he admitted sheepishly, and drew something from his pocket which, when removed from the oilcloth it was wrapped in, looked like a futuristic disc drive. "I saw it one day about ten years ago when I wandered into a room that I wasn't allowed in, and I just knew it was mine. One day about a week ago I walked past that room and I felt it, like it was pulling on me, or maybe pushing - I don't know, but it was calling to me somehow. So I waited for the right time and I took it, and then I left. And then I just kind of followed it, if that makes any sense. It was like a magnet, it wanted to come here, so I came here."

Jonathan nodded, trying to circumvent for a moment the notion that a slab of metal had induced and directed Callen back to them. "Where did you come here from?"

"I don't know exactly," Callen shrugged. "It wasn't much different from this. It was a farm, the land was similar, and it didn't take very long to get here. Maybe twenty minutes, but I ran kind of slow because I didn't want to miss it. Guessing from the maps I used to get to study when I was younger, I think I was in Nebraska? I'm not sure. I didn't notice until I got here that there are signs on the roads to tell you where you are. I've never seen one before."

"You ran here from Nebraska in twenty minutes." Martha's whispered response was a statement, as she barely had the strength to raise her inflection to make it a question.

"Yes…" Callen drawled slowly, somewhat perplexed. "I said I ran slowly, or I could have been here faster."

"No, Callen, you don't understand," Jonathan interjected gently. "People can't just run to Kansas from Nebraska in twenty minutes. They can't do a day's farm work in two hours, single-handedly. They can't catch falling coffee cups without spilling a drop or refold a stack of towels the second they hit the floor."

Callen's eyes widened and his jaw went slack as synapses fired, making connections that he'd never made before, all the things he'd been told to do because they were his assigned tasks, so he never questioned them. He assumed it was work that nobody else would do - not that nobody else _could_ do, or at least not the way he did it. He recalled all the times he'd seen Mr. Andy gingerly back his way down the ladder to the hayloft. He'd only idly wondered then why the fit, strong man never simply jumped down. It never occurred to Callen that he couldn't do it - that he himself was the only one who could do the things he could do. He'd never considered that his life wasn't like those he'd read about in books, because he was not like the people in them.

_I'm different._

_Why?_

Callen let his gaze sink into Martha's, and for an instant each knew the depth of the other's loneliness. For one fleeting, vaporous moment, Martha Kent felt the buoyancy of motherhood, carrying the weight of a child that belonged to her, if only in spirit.

Then before she could grasp him, he slipped away again, speeding out of sight before the kitchen door closed behind him.

The little face was gone again.


	8. Inner Piece

CHAPTER SEVEN: INNER PIECE

Martha Kent looked at her arms. They hung limply from her drooping shoulders, resting on either side of her lap where they'd fallen after the shock of Callen's flight propelled her to the living room couch. She collapsed there, a heap of abandoned maternal instinct, and began to wonder if she could draw the strength to move again while contemplating the renewed emptiness of her arms. She'd reached for Callen. He needed her - she knew he did - just as he did the day he'd been snatched from view beside the overturned truck, but this time he'd snatched himself from her grasp.

The Unsinkable Martha Kent, some had begun to call her. Still warm and perseverant after all the trials that life had handed her, still keeping her chin up and hoping for the best. Even when she could do nothing more than tread water, she managed.

Her arms were tired now. Tired of treading water. Tired of reaching. Tired of fighting to hold on to things that couldn't be held even though she _knew_ that she was meant to.

_What am I missing now? Why am I always missing something?_

Jonathan looked down at his wife. So long denied, she was. So patient. So hopeful. So ready. She'd been rehearsing for the role of motherhood for a long as she could remember, and it seemed as if she'd never get to take the stage.

Martha's hands were resting beside her knees, upturned and empty. Jonathan sank beside her and took them both, trying to fill them with reassurance, though he knew it was something else she longed to feel. _It isn't fair_, he thought.

"It isn't fair at all," Martha choked, her voice an echo of Jonathan's own silence. So many years together had given them deep understanding of one another. Martha turned to her husband with tears streaming over her ashen expression. "This is all we've been waiting for, every day, every minute. Why? Why do other people have child after child and take them for granted, and we have to chase this same dream over and over again? Why do we keep praying and waiting, only to lose again? Why did Callen come _here_, why now?"

Jonathan swallowed and tried to assemble an answer to even one of the questions that bled through Martha's tears, unaware that Callen had slipped back into the room just in time to hear Martha ask why he'd come back to them.

_Why did Callen come here, why now_?

The sound of tears didn't soften the edge of the words. Not to Callen's ears. He thought he'd explained why he'd come. _They don't want me here, not now._ Confusion overtook his sense of logic, and his fear of being unwelcome outweighed the acceptance he'd been shown. He stepped back to the door. He'd become so adept at moving stealthily in and out of rooms, he was seldom noticed.

However, he'd never tried to move stealthily away from his mother's intuition.

"Callen?" Martha suddenly found the strength to stand and turn to see Callen with one foot out the door. "No! Callen, don't leave again, don't go. Stay, come back, please." She took a step toward him and - for the last time, she prayed - reached out an empty arm. "Please?"

The last word stood alone, imploring, lonely, desperate - things that Callen understood. "You… you do want me here?"

Martha burst into tears and crossed the room to him, embracing him forcefully in refusal to allow him the chance to leave again. She could find no words to better express how deeply she and Jonathan wanted him to be there. It wasn't his first embrace from Martha, but it was more in earnest and it almost frightened him. He tried to loosen her grip at least enough to step back and see her face. Her eyes.

"No Callen please, please don't try to go," Martha begged as Callen twisted. "I don't understand what's going on here or why you seem to be different, but you need to stay. You _belong_ here, you belong with us, you just can't go again. You _can't_." Now it was Martha who needed to meet his eyes. "I…" she turned to Jonathan and back to Callen. "We love you."

Callen went rigid. He no longer fought Martha's encircling arms. She didn't yet know that if he'd truly wanted to escape from her, he could have without feeling her resistance. She didn't know that he longed to feel the warmth of family, to have Christmas dinners and birthdays and laughter. She didn't know that during the moments while she was on the couch wondering if her arms would always be empty, Callen had run halfway back to Nebraska wondering how he could live for fourteen years not knowing that his own arms and legs and back were nothing like anyone else's. She didn't know that he didn't expect to be wanted anywhere. She didn't know that he'd never heard "love" out loud.

She didn't know that her love would make him cry.

The boy had uncommon physical strength, that much had become clear, but no person's strength is a match for his own heart when the weight of his emotions gathers within it. Callen, still in Martha's arms, suddenly clutched her by the shoulders and buried his face against her. They sank together to the floor, mother and son, and Jonathan knelt and clasped his own arms around them both. The joy and relief that filled all three hearts was palpable, but immeasurable. There were questions - so many, many questions - but none that compared to this true reunion.

"So," Callen sputtered after what seemed like an hour's tearful celebration, "I really can live here?"

Martha's tears flowed directly into her smile. "Oh, oh yes, you will absolutely live here!" she cried. She took Jonathan's hand. "This is your home now, Callen. This is your family." Her grin could not be suppressed, not even when Jonathan kissed her, and she could only laugh when Callen used his sleeve to wipe his nose. They were a jumbled teary mess on the floor, the three of them, but they were a family.

They always had been.


End file.
